The English Bill of Rights of 1689 is an Act of Parliament that ended the unilateral powers of the English Crown, guaranteed certain protections to subjects, secured Parliament’s independence from royal interference, and set the rules of succession to the throne. Passed after the overthrow of King James II, it converted royal prerogatives into privileges bounded by law and remains partially in force in the United Kingdom today. Its language and principles were later borrowed by the framers of the United States Constitution.1UK Parliament. Bill of Rights 1689
Why Parliament Passed It
The Bill grew out of the Glorious Revolution. King James II had suspended laws passed by Parliament, levied taxes without legislative consent, kept a standing army in peacetime, prosecuted clergymen for petitioning him, and disarmed Protestant subjects while arming Catholics.2Avalon Project. English Bill of Rights 1689 He had also packed juries and set bail at impossible levels to keep opponents locked up.
After James fled the country in late 1688, a Convention Parliament assembled and presented William of Orange and his wife Mary with a written Declaration of Right that listed those abuses alongside the rights the new monarchs were expected to uphold. The Crown was offered on those terms and accepted. Later in 1689, Parliament enacted the Declaration’s content as a statute — the Bill of Rights.3UK Parliament. The Glorious Revolution
What the Bill Took Away From the Crown
The Bill’s most consequential provisions stripped the monarch of the power to override Parliament. Two separate clauses hit two separate royal practices. The suspending power, by which a king could halt a law’s operation entirely, was declared flatly illegal. The dispensing power, by which a king could exempt specific individuals from a law’s requirements, was likewise abolished; past dispensations were voided and future ones banned unless Parliament itself authorized the exception in a specific bill.4Legislation.gov.uk. Bill of Rights 1689 James II had leaned on the dispensing power to place Catholics in military and government posts despite laws barring them, and closing both doors meant no future monarch could selectively rewrite the law.
Royal finances came under the same logic. Raising money for the Crown by claiming royal prerogative, without a parliamentary grant specifying the amount and duration, was declared illegal. That gave Parliament direct control over government revenue and, by extension, government policy.
Military power received similar treatment. Keeping a standing army within the kingdom in peacetime without Parliament’s consent was declared unlawful. Parliament reinforced this almost immediately through the Mutiny Act of 1689, which authorized military discipline for only one year at a time and so forced legislators to reconvene annually to renew the army’s legal basis.
What the Bill Guaranteed to Subjects
Beyond restraining the Crown, the Bill established personal protections for subjects that had been violated under James II.
Petition and Arms
The right of subjects to petition the monarch was expressly recognized, and arresting or prosecuting anyone for exercising it was declared illegal.2Avalon Project. English Bill of Rights 1689 This answered James II’s prosecution of seven bishops who had petitioned him to withdraw a religious declaration.
Protestant subjects received the right to keep arms for their defense, “suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”4Legislation.gov.uk. Bill of Rights 1689 Two qualifiers limited that right from the start: it applied only to Protestants, and it was restricted both to weapons appropriate to a person’s social rank and to whatever further limits the law imposed. It was not a universal right to arms. It targeted the specific grievance that James II had disarmed Protestants while arming Catholics.
Bail, Fines, and Punishment
A single clause tackled several abuses of the courts. Excessive bail was forbidden, closing the tactic James II’s government had used to hold political opponents by setting bail no one could pay. Excessive fines were likewise prohibited, and the same clause banned cruel and unusual punishments — a phrase that would later travel almost word-for-word into American law.4Legislation.gov.uk. Bill of Rights 1689
Jury composition was also addressed. The Bill required that jurors be properly selected and, for high treason trials, that they be freeholders. James’s government had stacked juries with unqualified and sympathetic members to secure convictions, and this provision aimed to prevent a repeat.
How the Bill Protected Parliament
Several provisions ensured Parliament could function as a genuine check on the Crown rather than as a rubber stamp.
Elections for members of Parliament were required to be free from royal interference. James II had manipulated elections by revoking borough charters and installing loyalists, and the Bill made that kind of tampering a recognized abuse.
Freedom of speech within Parliament received one of the statute’s strongest protections. Debates and proceedings in either chamber could not be questioned or prosecuted in any court or other venue outside Parliament.4Legislation.gov.uk. Bill of Rights 1689 That immunity let members criticize government policy, expose corruption, and debate controversial questions without being hauled before a judge afterward. It remains one of the most important protections in British constitutional law.
Finally, the Bill said Parliaments “ought to be held frequently” to address grievances and maintain the laws. The statute did not define “frequently,” and Parliament closed that gap five years later with the Triennial Act of 1694, which required new elections at least every three years and forbade any gap of more than three years between sessions.
Succession and the Catholic Bar
The Bill turned the line of succession from a matter of hereditary divine right into a product of statute. It granted William sole exercise of executive power during the couple’s joint lives, with the Crown passing after their deaths first to Mary’s heirs, then to Princess Anne of Denmark and her heirs, and finally to William’s heirs.2Avalon Project. English Bill of Rights 1689 By writing that sequence into legislation, Parliament asserted that it, not God or tradition, decided who wore the Crown.
The most rigid requirement was religious. Anyone who professed the Catholic faith or married a Catholic was permanently barred from inheriting or possessing the throne.4Legislation.gov.uk. Bill of Rights 1689 Each new monarch was also required, either at their coronation or at the first meeting of their first Parliament, whichever came first, to recite publicly a declaration from a statute of Charles II’s reign that rejected core Catholic doctrines. Parliament reinforced these exclusions in the Act of Settlement of 1701, which confirmed the Catholic bar and extended the succession to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, after the lines set by the Bill of Rights ran out.5UK Parliament. The Act of Settlement
What the Bill Did Not Do
Its limits are easy to miss from a modern angle. The Bill was a settlement between the Crown and a narrow political class, not a charter of universal liberty.
The “free elections” clause meant free from royal manipulation. It said nothing about who could actually vote. The franchise remained restricted to a small minority of property-owning men, and the Bill made no attempt to expand it. Meaningful expansion of voting rights would not come for nearly two centuries.
Catholics bore the brunt of the Bill’s exclusions. Beyond the ban on Catholic monarchs, the broader legal environment treated Catholics harshly. From the mid-1690s onward, annual Land Tax Acts required Catholics to pay double the rate levied on everyone else, and additional laws imposed penalties on anyone who refused to swear loyalty oaths rejecting Catholic beliefs.6UK Parliament. Catholics and Nonconformists The right to keep arms applied exclusively to Protestants and was further limited by social rank and existing law. Jury protections addressed selection, not access to a jury trial as a general right.
Influence on the U.S. Constitution
The 1689 statute served as a direct template for several provisions of the U.S. Constitution and its first ten amendments, adopted a century later.
The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments tracks the 1689 clause almost verbatim. The English provision addressed not only torture but also punishments that were arbitrary or disproportionate to the offense, and that principle carried over into American jurisprudence.7Legal Information Institute. Historical Background on Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Speech or Debate Clause in Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution protects members of Congress from being questioned in any other forum for their legislative speech and debate. Its key terms — “speech,” “debate,” and “questioned” — were drawn directly from the 1689 statute’s parliamentary privilege clause. The framers adopted the provision at the Constitutional Convention with little recorded discussion, and later courts inferred that they intended to incorporate the English principles by using the same language.8Legal Information Institute. Historical Background on the Speech or Debate Clause
Other connections run through the First Amendment’s right to petition the government for redress of grievances, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, and the Third Amendment’s prohibition on quartering soldiers in private homes without consent. Each had a corresponding clause or grievance in the 1689 Bill.9National Constitution Center. On This Day, the English Bill of Rights Makes a Powerful Statement The American framers universalized some provisions the English version had restricted, most notably by dropping the Protestant-only qualifier on arms, and tightened others by writing them as absolute prohibitions rather than aspirational statements of what “ought” to be.
Is It Still Law?
Unlike many historical documents that survive only as relics, the Bill of Rights 1689 remains partially in force as active statute. Its core principles — frequent Parliaments, free elections, freedom of speech in parliamentary proceedings, no taxation without Parliament’s consent, the right of petition, and fair treatment by courts — continue to be cited in legal cases.1UK Parliament. Bill of Rights 1689 Parliamentary privilege in particular remains one of the most practically significant surviving provisions; courts still decline to examine what members of Parliament say during debates, relying on the immunity the 1689 statute established.
The religious provisions have been softened. The Catholic exclusion from the throne stood for over three centuries, and the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 removed the bar on monarchs marrying Catholics. The prohibition on a Catholic actually becoming monarch, however, still stands.